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Re: CFR's IT contract cost woes.

Would love to get my grubby paws stuck in the CFR. Had the privilage of working with some of the best PM's in the business, with the right people you can redesign and rebuild this whole thing in a couple of months. From my experience the fuckup comes from one of 2 places, the IT guys do as they want and it sucks from a daily ops perspective or the other way around. But of course all this money will go to some BEE Tenderpeneur so ja.

Re: CFR's IT contract cost woes.

I am responsible for all server and storage infrastructure at 1 Parastatal and consulting on DR and Storage to another Parastatal. That includes Servers and Storage but not the network. I am not employed by them but is consulting to them and have been doing this now for a number of years. I agree that is a huge amount for one system but the SAPS being Gubberment is another story. I once was a member of the old SAP in the 1980 to 1990s. These numbers are estimates, typical what I would do for Budgetary purposes. I have no knowledge of what SAPS did or what technologies they deployed nor of what capacity was procured by SAPS. So my numbers will not be spot on, but likely be fairly close. The only unknow that will have a rather big bearing on the costs will be the capacity and technologies selected.

SAPS have about 308 DFO offices all over the country. The system will be rolled out to each of these with a number of workstations each. These may or may not be dedicated, I do not know. We looking at 300 - 600 workstations, each with a service contract by the service provider as well as a warranty extension contract with the manufacturer. The SP contract will be SLA based and payable on a monthly basis. The workstation will be lets say R5k and the monthly SLA about R1k (remote locations and a lot of time to travel etc etc) The warranty could be R2.5k per workstation up front.

So lets calculate: 500 workstations = R 2 500 000; 500 workstations extended warranty R 1 250 000; SLA monthly cost R 500 000 *12 for yearly cost = R 6 000 000
Total = R 9 750 000 for the first year and R 7 250 000 per year thereafter. So for a ten year period it totals R 67 750 000 and this is only for the workstations.

Now add the training on the IT stuff of all the 500 -1000 DFOs and that will be a few more Million.

Firstly here we show no software development costs yet. But lets agree it cost R 10 000 000 due to Gubberment inefficiencies (Sorry brukutu you may be efficient but Gubberment aint, think of poor Juju and other tenderpreneurs).

So now lets look at the Servers and storage for this system. In big projects we need the infrastructure for the Servers and storage itself for the system in production. This will be a 3 tiered system so we have Data Base Servers in a cluster at about R 10 000 000 for the pair. Then a number of Application Servers, lets make that 4 servers at a total cost of R 500 000. Now we need some front end Servers so lets make that 8 Servers at a cost of R 600 000 (different configuration) We need some Load balancing appliances in front of all this so another R 2 000 000. Ok so production is sorted at R 13 100 000

Oops forgot about the Storage systems ;) R 10 000 000 for a SAN like the IBM SVC or the Hitachi or EMC Storage Virtualisation Controllers with say 200TB storage with some SSD disks for performance. So now we have R 23 100 000 for the Production system. Vendor Warranty extension for 3 years may be 20% per year over 3 years will then be R 13 860 00 to be extended for another 3 years before all this stuff is thrown away and new hardware is installed with all these costs again.

So over a 10 year period total cost would be R 46 200 000 for servers alone, no SLA costs yet. The Data base servers would be about R 30 000 per month or R 3 600 000 for 10 years and the other servers about R3 000 per month or R 2 880 000 over 10 years.

So now we looking at a realistic 10 year cost of no less than R 150 000 000 (this is production only) considering that the system was implemented in the early 2000s. So now we have to have a DR system if production fails. So lets assume they went for a system with 50% of Prod capacity, it will still cost about R 25 000 000 not thinking about the support and SLA costs. Then we need a QA system and a DEV system as well as a Test/Pre-Prod system. So they will be similar in size and cost to DR or a bit smaller. So lets make them to be R 20 000 000 each so that is another R 60 000 000 for just the server infrastructure alone, easily another R150 000 000 for a total of R 300 000 000 Million over 10 years.

Please remember these numbers are not based on SAPS facts, merely on my understanding of hardware cost and systems architecture in general. Numbers are estimates of typical system that needs to support 2000 users (CFR and DFOs) with room left for some systems growth. Considering Change Controls and other delays in the system, it is easy to see why they are 70 months behind. That is apart from the fact that nobody really wants the system and the service providers are milking the system in all likelihood.

Re: CFR's IT contract cost woes.

huh............? I must be at the wrong forum, or are you talking in code? Server = firearms, Network = ammo, system = mission, database = large calibers?????????????? This sounds like a secret operation to me.

huh............? I must be at the wrong forum, or are you talking in code? Server = firearms, Network = ammo, system = mission, database = large calibers?????????????? This sounds like a secret operation to me.

We are operating under extreme threat level Condition 1 Max Red Alpha. You just gave away our code! OPSEC!!!!!!

Re: CFR's IT contract cost woes.

sarel I'm not an expert on hardware but for the CFR's system that backend sounds like a complete overkill.

I work in the telecoms industry and what you're proposing is the type of system I've seen put down for a highly available system that needs to take serious load with 100s of users trying to send messages and download shit at the same time.

The CFR's system is hardly going to take any load whatsoever. I'm guessing if there are 200 licenses processed per day it's a busy day at the office. The whole thing will be able to run on two servers, one internal for the staff, one in the DMZ where Joe Nobody can go to www.cfr.co.za to check the status of his application. Add a failover or load balanced pairs for redundancy. You can have identical DEV, QA, PROD and DR environments on 16 entry level servers.

As for the database requirements - you don't need anything spectacular that is able to do 1000 transactions a second. Probably more like 2000 writes and 20000 reads per day. Nothing.

Now I don't know the requirements so this is all speculation. But hell, how complicated can it be?

Then again I've been around long enough that it will not surprise me in the slightest if someone sold a complete overkill system to the CFR.

sarel I'm not an expert on hardware but for the CFR's system that backend sounds like a complete overkill.

I work in the telecoms industry and what you're proposing is the type of system I've seen put down for a highly available system that needs to take serious load with 100s of users trying to send messages and download shit at the same time.

The CFR's system is hardly going to take any load whatsoever. I'm guessing if there are 200 licenses processed per day it's a busy day at the office. The whole thing will be able to run on two servers, one internal for the staff, one in the DMZ where Joe Nobody can go to www.cfr.co.za to check the status of his application. Add a failover or load balanced pairs for redundancy. You can have identical DEV, QA, PROD and DR environments on 16 entry level servers.

As for the database requirements - you don't need anything spectacular that is able to do 1000 transactions a second. Probably more like 2000 writes and 20000 reads per day. Nothing.

Now I don't know the requirements so this is all speculation. But hell, how complicated can it be?

Then again I've been around long enough that it will not surprise me in the slightest if someone sold a complete overkill system to the CFR.

I'm no expert on the hardcore technical side. I see this whole thing working like a system you would find at big retailers that have multiple stores.

Gunshops directly access CFR database using a system similar to those used by large retailers. Online applications in store with barcode scanner for ID and a webcam for your pics. Physical paperwork kept on file should CFR want to do an audit. CFR system check your criminal record etc and give a yes/no. All you wait for is your card. If the system can give ayou a random reference nr you can drive to CFR office and pick up your card.

Re: CFR's IT contract cost woes.

People in IT can tell you one thing, the money isn't made by selling a PC, it's made by selling the maintenance for it.
The buddy-buddy(BEE) system doesn't help, but it is the law. Money isn't worth much, so don't look at these figures and think wow.
You can sell a typewriter to Noah, but that doesn't mean he can use it, if he can't he will blame the product and find another. This is not the first failed project, nor the last. It is however a very good reason to postpone the process.